I wrote my last memo as Chair of the Department of Art and Architecture and dropped it in campus mail today. Hurrah! Then I sent emails to all sorts of people on campus who contact me as chair (you know, the Registrar, the Business Office, Communications, and the Deans of Hobart and of William Smith Colleges) and reminded them that they should be contacting someone else from now on!

And now it’s something with the motherboard. All under warranty – I’m just hoping it gets repaired before I leave for Chattanooga on Friday morning (that is to say, before closes of business tomorrow)!

Grades in this morning – almost free! I need to write ONE memo to the Provost and then my SABBATICAL BEGINS.

Few foreign secretaries have faced more difficulties than those which faced Sir Edward Grey from 1906 to 1914 and few grappled with them more steadfastly. The first of the various charges from which Grey should be exonerated is that of insufficient concentration, a charge based on the somewhat irritating frequency with which he expressed his preference for bird-watching at Fallodon compared with his duties at the Foreign Office. The evidence is rather that this was no more than an oblique and wholly creditable method of expressing his sense of the magnitude of his task and of the distatesfulness of the men and the tendencies he had to deal with as Foreign Secretary. To express, however frequently, a preference for studying the habits of wild birds and ornamental ducks in the midst of a working life devoted to coping with the consequences of policies controlled (if that is the right word) by men as unreliable as William II, Bülow, Kiderlen-Wächter, Aehrenthal, Conrad von Hoetzendorf, Izvolsky and the rest is evidence not of idleness but of an acute and understandable sense of strain.

The deputy mayor would like the discovery of this substantial basilica to mean that Serdica (Roman Sofia, Bulgaria) was in the running with Byzantion to be Constantine’s Nova Roma. Examining our list of the buildings Constantine did build while turning Byzantion into Constantinopolis (and don’t forget the walls!), evaluate this claim.